It can be hard to separate the art from the life of Carlo Gesualdo, music's most notorious madrigalist and double murderer. The Australian composer Brett Dean believes that Gesualdo's anguished harmonies and homicidal instincts were inextricably linked: his rivetingly unorthodox piece Carlo is a form of musical biography for strings, tape and sampler, in which the souls of the composer and his victims seem to be shouting to get out.

Dean's work enfolds recorded examples of Gesualdo's vocal music within a shady string texture whose quick, dynamic flashes are reminiscent of a blade carving through the darkness of a Caravaggio painting. There are few occasions in music that can be described as genuinely frightening: yet when the electronically treated susurrations of the original madrigal burst from the speakers, it was as if the Northern Sinfonia had been joined on stage by a poltergeist. There's a similarly arresting effect towards the end of Mendelssohn's Reformation symphony No 5, an uneven and underperformed piece, which unexpectedly musters its forces into a massive, contrapuntal exhortation of the Lutheran chorale Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott. Thomas Zehetmair ensured that the early movements' curious mix of grave spiritualism and frolicking folk dances just about held together, but the cathartic arrival of the chorale sounded as if the orchestra had suddenly become possessed by the spirit of JS Bach.

Bruckner's Requiem in D Minor is a similarly backward-glancing work whose modest forces and fleet-footed variations over a ground bass pays homage to the baroque. The sense was reinforced by a set of soloists including the opalescently toned soprano Elizabeth Watts and lyrical bass Stephan Loges, whose strengths lie in the early music field. Bruckner's assessment of his youthful effort was: "It isn't bad." Posterity's verdict: he wasn't wrong.